Today, and for the last 10 years, UTF-8 has been the default and I
cannot think of any kind of terminal in the last 30 years that is
unable to display UTF-8 properly.I use almost exclusively the console myself (no X-window) and I can tell that UTF-8 plays nicely in it, even with the kernel-induced limitation of 512 glyphs. I use the Terminus bdf font, witht he "Uni2" codeset. This codeset covers latin, cyrillic and greek, i.e. much of the Unicode BMP.
